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As economic growth languishes and worries about the specter of deflation mount, much-needed infrastructure development and new sources of project financing could provide a panacea to global growth.

It is essential for companies to work with banking partners they know they can trust. Global Finance’s annual ranking of World’s Safest Banks have been the recognized and trusted standard of financial counterparty safety for more than 20 years.

This year, we updated the name of the awards to reflect the extent to which digitization is transforming our lives in general and banking in particular. By renaming this as the Digital Bank Awards, we are making the competition more inclusive of current technology and more future-focused in anticipation of developments still to come.

Emerging Markets Roundup: Africa

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Global oil group Chevron approved a $5.6 billion development project in Angola.

The Mafumeira Sul offshore oil field will be its second-largest African investment, after the Agbami field in Nigeria. The new project is slated to begin production in 2015 and is expected to produce 110,000 barrels of crude oil per day from five platforms.

Zambian copper production is forecast to increase to 1.5 million tons by 2017, from this year’s expected 800,000 tons, according to the country’s mining chamber. Much of the increase will be sparked by new foreign investments to expand output capacity. These include a $2 billion project by Canada’s First Quantum Minerals and an $832 million project led by China’s Nonferrous Mining.

Ghana’s capital of Accra is the sub-Saharan city with the greatest growth potential, according to MasterCard’s African Cities Growth Index. Joining Accra at the top of the 19-city index are Lusaka, Zambia; Luanda, Angola; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The Liberian government has placed an electronic billboard in downtown Monrovia to show the country’s public finances. The “Open Budget Initiative,” funded partly by development agency USAID, shows government debt, budget allocations and revenue flows, among other data points.